The Vergecast - Can a YouTube video really fix your wet phone?

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of the native resonance of your smartphone:  02:32 -The Verge’s David Pierce tries to find out if those YouTube videos promising to remove water from your phone with sounds actually work.  32:42 - Then, David chats with The Verge’s Alex Heath about some AR glasses that are reportedly set to launch from Snap and Meta this fall. 59:16 - Later, David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about competition in the AI industry. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the native resonance of your smartphone. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in our studio. I mentioned on the show last week that we just got this new studio. If you've been watching on YouTube, you've seen it. I'm very jealous, so I got on the Amtrak, came all the way up, and now I'm sitting in this chair in the corner that exists for reasons as yet to be figured out. Anyway, I am here because we have podcasting to do. Today on the show, we have a couple of really fun things to talk about.

We're going to talk to Alex Heath about this like glut of headsets that is coming up. We're going to get stuff from meta. We're going to get stuff from SNAP. There's been some news about the stuff that we're getting from meta that's pretty interesting. But in general, the VR-A-R headset craze continues and seems to be unstoppable. And we're going to talk about it. We also have a story that I've been reporting kind of for months now, all based on a YouTube video that claims to get the water out of your phone. I have lots of questions and we're going to get answers.

All of that is coming up in just a second along with an answer to your questions from the Vergecast hotline. But first, there are lots of microphones in here and I have to go scream into the mall and see what trouble I can get into. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports. And mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics.

New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. So a few months ago, my family went to a town called Reedville, Virginia. It's this very cute but very tiny little fishing town with only a few hundred residents. I have no idea why we went there, honestly. I think my mom just found a cool house on Airbnb for pretty cheap and was like, sick, house on the river for the weekend. out behind that Airbnb, there was this little dock that stuck out into the water.

And the day after we got there, my nephew went out onto the dock to fish. I was sitting on this little bench they had at the very end of the dock. And I got lazy, so I put my feet up because I was like, okay, I'm going to relax. And then all of a sudden, my phone, I feel this slipped right out of my pocket and it falls right into the water. That's Chris. That's my nephew. And his phone is a Samsung Galaxy S-24, basically still brand new. So Chris drops his phone. I saw it fall.

Like as soon as he went past the dock, I saw it and then goes, and it starts sinking down. Just down, down, down, down and down. Did you think about jumping in? Immediately, but then I was like, that's a bad idea. I'm going to go run back and tell them what happened, and hopefully can help me out. Chris comes running inside the house where I'm hanging out with a bunch of our other family members and tells us what happens.

We all immediately jump up, go outside, grab all the nets and stuff. can find and start scraping through the muck at the bottom of the river trying to find his phone. And Miracle of Miracles, we actually found it. Caden, my other nephew, grabbed it in a big net and just pulled it up and there it was. It was kind of amazing. At the end of it all, the phone had probably been underwater for 10, maybe 15 minutes. And when it came up in that net, the screen was actually on. So it seemed like we might have avoided the worst.

But still, everyone was worried, right? Wet phones are bad, no matter what the screen is currently doing. And the S-24 did have that warning notification that said water had gotten inside. We brought it inside. I believe we tried... No, we didn't even try it out because someone brought up an idea that he had, and we tried it out, to literally what he did, because it was still a little water, it was still working properly. He opened up a YouTube video and started playing this weird sound that, like, changed, like, made the speakers, like, do a whole bunch of weird sounds and, like, ended up,

I think, pushing out some of the water, or at least loosing it up. This is where our story really begins. The somebody in question here is Gabe, a friend who had come with us for the weekend. So we're all standing in the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do for Chris's phone. And Gabe is just like, oh, there's this YouTube video that gets all the water out of your speakers. I have been thinking about that YouTube video ever since. And actually, it's not just one video, but a whole genre of them. And they are shockingly popular.

There's sound to remove water from phone speaker, parentheses, all caps, guaranteed, which has 45 million views. 45 million views. Water out of speaker sound iPhone, parentheses, 100% fix. 3.9 million views. 165 Hertz, test tone, pure sign, wave, 5 min,

remove water from phone, best version, 27 million views. On and on and on. Hundreds of millions of views on these videos from all over the place. And the comments, honestly, are the best part.

One just says, I think this is the most important video on YouTube, no matter how many years go through, this vid will just keep getting more views. And another one says, damn, we're really the elite gang bringing our phones in the showers. Another one. At this point, this video is going to show up in my Spotify Rapped. That one actually made me laugh really hard. I'm still going to bring my phone in the shower again, so see you guys tomorrow.

That's another one. But here's my favorite one. And you actually see a lot of these on these videos. Everyone's saying how they dropped theirs in a shower or a pool of water, I dropped mine in cereal. Edit, two months later, and I'm back here again because I did the same thing again. Edit two, can't believe it's been a year since I've gotten some sort of liquid in my phone. Well, time to reset the counter because my phone magically landed into my pool. The point is there are millions of people out here, apparently just cavalierly taking their phones into the shower, the pool, the rain, whatever, and trusting that a YouTube video will fix it.

Before we get too far, I just want to play you a clip from one of these videos. I'm only going to play you a few seconds of it because it's not, you know, pleasant audio, but just want to give you the idea of what this is doing. So, without further ado, here are the lush sounds of sound to remove water from phone charging port, parentheses, one hour version. Like I said, it's not nice to listen to, but it's not really supposed to be. It's supposed to do a job. And ever since that day, trying to fix Chris's phone, I've been wondering if it really works.

Because on the one hand, lots of people are using the, videos, and clearly their phones keep working, so great. But on the other hand, maybe that's just because our phones have gotten impressively waterproof and generally durable over the years. So the big question is, did we get the water out of Chris's phone? Or did Samsung keep the water from ever getting in? I became obsessed with this question. I had to know.

So the first thing I did was reach out to a bunch of phone makers to see what they thought. I didn't get much from Google or Samsung or Apple, except for vague responses kind of along the lines of seems like it might theoretically work. A few companies did point me to their official support pages for liquid damage and what to do if your phone gets wet. Apples, for instance, says to tap it gently against your hand with the lightning or USB port facing down and then leave it in a dry area. That's roughly the advice you'll get from most of these companies.

That doesn't answer my question at all. The most compelling piece of evidence I had for my specific question from the very beginning was actually the Apple Watch. It has this feature for swimmers where you can turn the digital crown to eject water out through the speakers. Some other smart watches like the Samsung Galaxy watch do something similar. This seems like in theory the same sort of idea. But Apple presumably has access to all of the tech inside the watch to do that stuff.

So is it the same thing when you just play a video on YouTube? Actually, to be honest, the more I got into this and the more I researched and tried to figure out how all of this works, the more I realized I don't even understand the basics of what's happening here. So I called up this guy. I'm Eric Freeman, and I'm a senior director of research at Bose. In addition to his day job, Eric literally teaches a class to Bose employees about how speakers work. And so I tried to get him to tell me how speakers work.

But I'm an idiot, so I made him start at the most basic place possible. Like, what is a speaker? I know what it's for. I know what it does. But if you actually opened up a speaker, what would you see inside? So I'm going to start from the back of kind of a conventional. speaker, which is the most common thing that you'll find. It's in, you know, the speakers that are in your Bluetooth speakers or your phone or even like pro audio equipment. It's all the same technology

for the most part. It's just tiny versus huge versus medium size. So if we start from the back, we've got a magnet. And the magnet has some steel parts around it. And the purpose of the steel parts is just to take the magnetic field lines and put them in a very specific. location. In that specific location, there's a coil of wire. So you have a coil of wire sitting inside of some magnetic field lines. And it turns out that when you run electrical current through a wire, it behaves like a magnet. It creates a magnetic field. So just like when you play with two magnets, you know, you can stick them together or have them repel each other. You can run current through a wire and have it attract to the permanent magnet or push away from the permanent magnet.

The long and short of it is this. You're using that magnetic field he's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston-shaped thing really, really, really fast, about 20 times per second, all the way to about 20,000 times per second. The long and short of it is this. You're using that magnetic field he's talking about to essentially push and pull a little piston-shaped thing really, really fast, somewhere between 20 and 20,000 times a second. And every time you do, it's moving air. So 20 is the low frequency, so the base. So like 20 up to, I don't know, 150 or so is generally considered the base range. And then as the frequency of vibration gets higher, you get into higher tones.

So above that is kind of like the vocal range and where a lot of instruments sit. It's called the mid-range. Like a lot of people are probably familiar with the, there's a base control, a mid-range control and a treble control, right? And as you go higher and higher and get into the thousands and tens of thousands of vibrations per second, that's the treble. To change the tone of a sound, you change how fast that little piston is moving back and forth. And to change the volume, you change how much that little piston moves. Thus, the bigger the speaker, the more space the piston has to move, so the more air

pushes around, so the bigger and louder it can be. Hypothetically, Eric told me that if you want to get your speaker to move as much air as aggressively as possible, you'd want to generate really low tones at really high volumes. The lowest tone that that speaker can reproduce at the loudest level that it can play, that will create the most air motion, which will push on the water

that's trapped inside the phone. So just super bassy music is just going to move more air inside of your device than anything else you would think of. Yes, that's right. So those YouTube videos, if you listen to them, it's not like really deep base because your phone can't go super deep in the base, but it plays kind of in the low range

of where a phone is able to make sound. So it uses the range where the phone can move its speaker the most. So if you have something in your phone you don't want to be in there, you play the lowest tones possible, as loud as possible, lots of air moves really intensely,

and boom, you're done. The science kind of tracks. When I asked Eric what he thought about my YouTube video question, he only really had one addendum to my theory. I think the one caveat is you would want to hold your phone so that gravity is your friend, right? You would want the speaker to be facing down. So the water that's trapped near the speaker would go as low as possible and probably like puddle against that little screen. And then you play that YouTube track with all that base and the cone starts pumping. I imagine what happens is, you know, with the pressure behind the water, it's pushed through the screen and it kind of spits out through the screen, right? And if you do that long enough, the water's going to jump around. and jiggle around, and eventually most of it's going to get pushed through the screen,

and there's probably a little residual amount that just needs to evaporate over time. Okay. So I'm almost certain an incredibly stupid question. But would the better idea to be to put your phone right in front of, or like inside of some much larger, much more powerful speaker? Because if the goal is to push as much air as forcefully as possible, should I do that? Or at this point, am I putting like an aluminum back in the way? and I'm just going to screw up the whole thing.

That's a really interesting idea. And I think if you were to stick your phone into a sealed cavity that a big woofer was pumping on, right? And you develop all this pressure. That's going to push air in and out of that screen for sure, right? So I think you could get a setup like that to pump the water out. The only danger is that really high pressure could damage the little speaker inside of your phone. so it's much safer to use your own speaker up to the limit of its capability. So at this point, I'm convinced that at least theoretically,

you can use a YouTube video to get water out of your phone. But I'm still stuck on this idea of whether these videos are a placebo or not. All these people using their phones in the shower or at the pool or whatever, are they actually fixing their phones this way? Or are they and my nephew Chris just really lucky that phones have gotten impressively waterproof over time? The only way to figure this out is just to do some people. testing. And luckily, I found some folks willing to help. I had first reached out to the team at IFixit when I hit up the phone manufacturers, basically just to ask, does this theoretically make sense to you?

I got an email back with a quote from IFixit repairability engineer Karsten Frawenheim. He also made the connection to the Apple Watch and said, quote, it's just a specific oscillating tone that pushes the water out of the speaker grills. Not sure how effective the third-party versions are for phones, since they're probably not ideally tuned. We could test. That is music to my ears, my friend. not long after that, I got on the phone with Sharam Maktari, the lead teardown technician at I Fix It. And he walked me through a theory he'd been developing ever since I sent that first email. Turns out he'd gone down kind of the same rabbit hole I had. At top of my notes here, and I am absolutely shocked, would never have occurred to me.

People are using their phones in the shower? Sharam had been wrestling with a question that I hadn't even thought of. If you can remove water from a phone using the speakers, and if Apple already has this feature built into the Apple Watch, why wouldn't it be built into the iPhone? This is definitely not something we should present as fact, but the watches are easier to waterproof. In all of Apple's terminology, they say how they're water resistant and not waterproof,

which is technically accurate. It's also been designed and has far fewer and limited cavities and holes in the watches than there are on the phones, which allows them to design to push the water out from those cavities. Whereas on the phone, the speakers are located at the bottom and the top, of the phone, which means you can't get cavities like the SIM card slot, it's just not possible to push water out from those cavities. I think that's why they don't include the same feature on the phones, because it's just, it's not going to work perfectly as it should or as they would want it to,

and they don't want to mislead people in thinking, hey, your phone is waterproof. Again, speculation, and we'll do some testing on that to figure it out. Like basically everyone else I had been talking to, Sharam bought the overall theory that speakers can move water, though he did say it can get screwy if the speakers themselves are actually damaged by the water. And that was just the first of a bunch of new caveats he had. Question of whether freshwater and salt water makes a difference. It pops up in my mind, which is something I plan to investigate. How long the water's been sitting in your phone is definitely going to make a difference

because salt water mineral and salt deposits are going to interfere with the function. And where is it not able to push the water out from which cavities are we going to have the most trouble? What does the water damage on the inside look like? And does this give people a false sense of confidence in the water resistance capabilities of both phones and watches? That last bit there is one of the things I've been wondering about this whole time. It's definitely true that phones are more durable and waterproof than ever. but it might actually be dangerous to trust that fact too much. Your phone might survive a drop in the pool or the toilet or whatever,

but you still shouldn't drop your phone in the pool or the toilet or whatever because lots of other things can go wrong. Phones also wear over time and lose some of that durability and impenetrability. So telling people, your phone is waterproof, so go nuts, it's actually maybe not a good or helpful or even true thing. Sharam, at the end of our first conversation, had a bunch of ideas for other tests he wanted to do. And he also looped in Chaiton Ritter,

a master's student in electrical engineering who has been working with I-Fix-it. He also had lots of ideas. I made me thinking ahead with like a, I don't know, I just want to throw it out there, but a test that we could do is we could get a phone, we could dunk it in a... Have you seen a pressure change, like a diving?

But we were just talking about that. We need to get one of those for some of the other ingress test things we had planned. But we could do this for the test, you could fill it with a UV reactive liquid, like put some dye in the water, put the phone in there, just dunk it and then take it out, maybe take it apart after, and then shine a light on it to

see where you'd get water in there. But that means you'd have to have two phones and then brand new phones you'd have to buy. I-Fixit has tons of phones lying around, but they've all already been opened up. That's I Fixit's thing. They're a company based on repairing electronics, so they get things to open them up and figure out how to repair them. And once you've pried a phone apart, you've kind of compromised it. So they just needed new phones to play with if this test was going to really feel like the real world. Luckily, I had a drawer full of phones to play with. I get a lot of phones for various reasons,

and sometimes the companies that ship them to us just don't want them back. Often we'll donate them or find another use for them, but sometimes they just sit around like forever. In this case, I have a box full of new and old phones that have just been moving around with me for years. So I decided to donate a few devices to science and put four phones in a box and shipped them to I-Fix it for sure. Ram and Chayton to take apart. The four phones, by the way, are not particularly representative of

anything, just what I had around and available to send. It was a Google Pixel 7 Pro, an iPhone 13, a Google Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1 that I think is from 2018. So some old, some new, some fancy, some less fancy, just something to get us started. A few weeks later, I got an email from Sharam and Chathen saying they had some answers for me. So we got back on a call. We got the four phones that You sent us. I tested using a UV bath, and we made that just by buying some of these. So we got, we got like several UV dyes. The original one we started with didn't work out slope.

So we got these like boat, like sewage tank things to like detect leaks if you're in the harbor. And they were amazing. It was, I don't know, do you watch Futurama at all? A little bit, yeah. Have you seen the drink slurm? I'm dying of thirst. Grab my feet and dunk my head in so I can drink. No, that's moronic.

Fine. I'll let go and swim around in the slurm and drink as much as I want. Help! You ended up looking like this, and I just thought it was hilarious, but these worked out great. In case you haven't watched Futurama, Slurm and this UV bath are both of these kind of toxic spill-green-looking liquids. And in Chaiton's case, the goal was to submerge a phone in the stuff, leave it there for about a minute, and then take it out. And if you look at your phone, you can probably guess where liquid is most likely to get in that process. It's around the power button, the volume keys, the port at the bottom, and the speakers up top and down below. That's where the phone is open, and that's where stuff can get in.

So the idea was, after a minute underwater, Chaiton would pick the phone out, gently tap it to get some of the water out, play one of our water-ejecting YouTube videos, and then leave the phone overnight. This is basically what you do if you just dropped your phone in a river, I think, so it felt like a pretty good test. But the slurm-green stuff would leave a trace of wherever it had lingered, which they'd then be able to see, under a UV light, so you'd know where liquid had managed to get inside the phone and stay there long enough to leave this residue. Anything that came in and then immediately was expelled wouldn't leave much trace. I should say, by the way, that liquid getting inside of your phone isn't, by definition, the end of the world. There are lots of different ways of waterproofing things and plenty of valid

different approaches to keeping the really sensitive bits of your device safe. All these companies will tell you that the main goal is not to keep water out, it's to keep your phone working no matter what happens. But if you can, you should probably try to keep everything out entirely. Because, sure, your phone might be safe from a few drops of pure fresh water getting inside, but oftentimes that's not what happens in the real world. I would assume if you left your phone a little longer in there or you weren't as lucky, we wouldn't be in the same situation.

Also, we're talking about taking this thing into the shower repeatedly, so one of these days, you will take it in and it will fail. Also, I don't know what other stuff is in shampoo, but it's probably more conductive than just any of liquid, like water. Right, that's the other part of this. It's like very rarely are you getting what amounts to perfectly fresh water inside of your iPhone? At least it'll smell nice after, you know? One of Apple's official recommendations, actually, if you get your phone submerged in liquid,

is to immediately rinse it with tap water. And it includes a picture of just shoving your phone under the kitchen faucet. Samsung also suggests soaking your phone in tap water if something like that happens, which seems wild to think about doing. But that's actually the point. These modern devices do do a lot to keep liquid out, but if something gets in and it's corrosive or otherwise chemically in some way,

you're in much more trouble. Anyway, Chaiton started showing me all these pictures of the phones that he'd taken with the UV light on, so you're just seeing basically the outline of the phone and these little neon green splotches everywhere that there had been liquid. He started with the iPhone 13.

So this is the inside of the screen, And you can clearly see around this little hole. There's a bunch of residue that was left behind. Now, on our speakers here, I was surprised that on the bottom speakers, at least, there wasn't as much as I thought there was going to be. And I opened these up. There's a fine mesh in there, and that mesh did a really good job of preventing anything from going into the speaker cavity itself. It's either like a really fine mesh. It felt like a mesh when I was rubbing a spider over it or tweezers, but it could just be textured plastic.

and it did a excellent job at keeping liquid out, and that was for all of the phones. Huh, because you would think that would be the most natural place for it to be there. So I guess it makes sense that they would pay special attention to it. Chaden did say he was a little surprised to see the iPhone not keep everything out, since the phone's a bit older, maybe the seal degraded, or maybe it just wasn't a perfect seal in the first place. But like we've been saying, the phone still worked, camera was fine, everything was fine. So maybe it's fine. Google's Pixel 7 Pro was next and kind of crushed it.

So this one was interesting because when I opened it up, there was no liquid inside it at all. It was dry. Like none of the water, like the detection stickers were triggered. The Pixel 3, though, not so good. This is the front. You know, obviously there's a big green mark here on the upper speaker and microphone. And then you can see the corners of the display too. So that's like you're going to see a drop of water underneath your screen, basically.

Yeah, I have the device here. It's not very visible when I'm holding it now, but if I sort of tilt it, I can kind of see something. And when I turned it on, it wasn't as... I mean, if you really looked at it, you could detect it, but it was sort of hard to see. But regardless, there's liquid in your display, and that's not a good thing.

There was lots of residue all around the Pixel 3, actually, in the SIM card slot and the USBC port, and lots of other places you just don't want liquid to be. It didn't seem like any of it had gotten so deep as to totally destroy the phone, except maybe that bit in the display, but it's not great either way. And the Nokia was even worse. There was residue around the battery and the screen. There was actually corrosion on the USB port, and the liquid detection sticker inside had triggered, which is usually bad news for your warranty. The other phones, though, didn't

trigger that sticker, even the ones that got a little liquid inside. I thought that was really interesting. Again, there are plenty of reasons for the differences here. Maybe the phone's just not that sealed in the first place, or maybe it degraded over time, maybe it got banged up in shipping, I don't know. Chayton and Sharam both kept saying that they wanted to do more testing. To test a phone the day it comes out, and then test another model of the same phone, six months or a year or two years later, to see how things change over time. It's a really cool idea, and I hope they do it, but it requires a lot of phones, and it gets really expensive, really fast. But for my purposes, we're getting somewhere. While he was testing the phones, Chaiton also took these super close-up,

slow motion videos of each phone as he played the YouTube video, and you can actually see them working. In almost every one of them, the sound starts, the phone starts buzzing, and immediately you get this burst of water coming out of the speaker grill. It's like the tiniest little water fountain you've ever seen. The effect slows down pretty fast, but that initial whoosh of air really does fire some water out of the speakers. The water comes out of both the top speaker and the bottom one, which in Chaiton's tests were also the two places water was most likely to get in in the first place. It's literally like spitting water out as it plays that video. But as Chaiton found, it doesn't get everything out.

I wonder if, like, once it got in there, because that match does a really good job of keeping stuff out, if a little bit that did get in, it's, you know, it's just going to keep it in there as well, too. This is actually a pretty good summation of the situation here. So recent phones, especially high-end ones, have, in fact got really good at keeping liquid out. Your phone may not be completely waterproof forever in all situations, but frankly, there's a good chance you can drop it in the river and it'll come out working okay. But if liquid does get in, it can be tricky to get back out because it has to go

back through that same nearly impenetrable seal that it had to go through to get into your phone in the first place. But can playing a video on YouTube help? I think so, at least a little. You can shake or tap the phone to get some liquid out and see that when it's wet. And playing a video like these does seem to generate some more powerful and forceful motion to get the droplets moving. There's just no denying the evidence of those drops flying out when you play the video and the phone starts vibrating. But it seems like it's only going to help in spots near the speaker. It's just not moving enough air to push everything around the phone and out of the various holes. Those grills at the bottom and top are the easiest place for liquid to get in,

and thus the easiest place to push them out. They also happen to be right next to the speakers. And what happens, it seems, is that after that first bit of liquid is initially ejected out, what's left ends up just kind of getting sloshed around as the speaker keeps moving. So, yes, a YouTube video might help a little, but it won't solve all of your problems. I say they kind of worry. I can't hurt, like, but I don't see it being end-all be-all fix or a way to pull all the liquid out. There are lots of good tips out there for getting liquid out of your phone.

Many of which boil down to the same thing. Try to get air moving with your mouth or a fan or canned air, but don't do it so aggressively that you might break something inside of the device. Put it in rice. Sure, use the silica beads, fine. There are a million strategies out there, and many of them work, at least a little. But Chaiton and Sharam both offered the same advice, which is frankly pretty simple and pretty good advice.

Don't take your phone in the shower. It might survive. You might play the video after you get out, and it might be okay. But next time, it might not. Every time your phone gets wet in any way, you are tempting fate. And eventually, one time you're going to do this, and the liquid damage gods are not going to care how quickly you manage to get the YouTube app open. But look, I'll just level with you.

After going through this whole process and learning all of this about how speakers work, I bookmarked one of these videos. And just the other day, I spilled like two thirds of a can of Seltzer right over top of my phone, immediately shook it out, tapped it, played the video, and my phone still works. I don't think my phone still works because I played that video, but it certainly didn't hurt, and it might have helped at least a little bit. It's all about getting air moving. You know what I mean?

I'm sure I'll be back in those comments before too long next time I spill some seltzer. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about headsets. We'll be right back. Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page, and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines, and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot.

I can deal with all this. But guess what? I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor.

They go, feminism has gone too far. You go, why? Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're the one with a charmed life. Could be a politician.

basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability

are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse.

And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials

and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay, I don't care if you have, All that, that's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning,

and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. So I was going to start this segment by saying it's almost gadget season, because, you know, it's the end of August, and usually it happens to be Labor Day, and then it happens to be gadget season. That's how it usually works. But right now, we are in the middle of gadget season.

Samsung did its thing early. Google did its thing early. We're barreling towards an Apple event. AI stuff is everywhere. It is firmly gadget season. And I think what we're actually about to start is headset season. There's been some reporting that meta and Snap and others are about to launch headsets. And we're getting to a place where we've been doing this VR and AR thing long. enough that I think we can start to ask questions about what we're doing here, about how far off this tech really is, and about what these companies can do now that works. The Verges, Alex Heath, has been reporting on all of this, both on the site and in his excellent newsletter command line, which you should absolutely subscribe to. So I figured we'd bring him on and just try to talk through

all of it. Alex, hello. Hi. So I want to talk about Snap and I want to talk about Meta. I think we should talk about Snap because I think we're only going to talk a little bit about Snap. And then we're going to talk a lot about meta. But basically you reported both of these companies are going to launch big new headsets, kind of within what we think, like a couple of weeks of each other in September. Okay, within a week of each other. So it's going to be, it's going to be a thing. I want to start with Snap because for years, my like sneakiest hot take about the tech industry was that Snap was way further ahead in all of this AR stuff than people realized and that at some point it was it was going to just release the thing and nobody would have seen it coming it sounds very much like all these years

later we are still not there this might not be that thing what are we doing here what is what is what is snap up to with spectacles like what is your sense of what's going on inside of snap as they think about this hardware thing that they've been working on all this time yeah since i've been reporting on this since gosh many years i've felt the same way like when is this finally going to arrive and it keeps getting pushed out. Snap and Meta are both showing these air glasses off that they've been working on, but they're essentially glorified prototypes. And Snap is repeating its playbook from 2021 where it released, I say released in quotes because it showed AR spectacles. And when we say that, it's, you know, displays inside the lenses where you can see

virtual objects on the real world. It showed those off and pitched it. is kind of a dev kit for its lens creators. And I got to try them. Journalists got to try them, but Snap never sold them. And they're, they waffled a bit on whether they would sell the version they're about to announce in September, the fifth generation, which I'm told is, you know, it's a meaningful upgrade, but it's more of a like an S-type iPhone model. It's more just a better, faster version of the design that they released in 2021. Which would be something. Yeah.

Like the one, the one we saw a couple of years ago was very cool. I got it in the most incredibly controlled demo, and it overheated like every 10 minutes. But when it worked, it was cool. Like the tech was fairly primitive, but pretty good. There's a lot of good ideas in there, as what I remember. And when, you know, I kept thinking, wow, like, when they finally fix the bugs here and the battery life and the display quality and the weight, like the ideas in the interface and how you use this thing really are compelling. It's just really hindered by the tech. And I would say that's actually been the story of AR glasses since Snap and Meta both started working on them around, you know, in earnest around 2017, 2016, 2018, is that the tech just hasn't been ready for the vision of what these companies think these glasses can do.

And yes, in the same way that Snap invented a lot of social media concepts like stories and ephemeral messaging that we use today in Meta's apps, they have been very early to eyewear with spectacles and smart glasses. And now meta feels like it's starting to take that narrative away from them. And I think they're hoping that, especially by going out, you know, a week before Zuckerberg is going to show off his glasses, their prototype will wow people and kind of remind everyone that they were actually first and they're still moving ahead here. But again, like they aren't selling these things. So they're glorified prototypes. Yeah. Do you think it even matters? Even if Snap comes out and says, you know, we've gone an order of magnitude ahead in technology.

these things are super cool, really exciting. What was it you said? They're not even planning to make 10,000 of them. It's like it's a science project. Like it is just a science project. And like I wonder at some point why Snap is going to continue to release these things. Like what is Spectacles doing for Snap at this point in time? That's a very good question.

And one that a lot of people inside Snap aren't even sure about to be perfectly honest. I mean, this is Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, the two co-founders baby. This hardware division. They're spending a lot of money still on it. And Snap as a business has just not been doing well. They've really struggled to scale their advertising business and build a sustainable, profitable, ads business on top of their messaging app, which I should note is bigger than ever.

They have, I believe it's over 800 million users globally. Snap as a social network is doing well. It's just that its business is not. And so investors are looking at their investment in hardware and going, do you really have the leash and the ability to compete here in such a capital intensive space where meta is investing, you know, billions and billions of dollars into AR? And Snap is really the David to the Goliath here. And that's been their story in social media.

And I think Evan Spiegel, the CEO thinks, you know, that they have a shot even in hardware. But I have become very skeptical, especially in the last few years, that Snap can be a meaningful player here. I mean, my read from just talking to company insiders is that they want to have a seat at the table for what Spiegel and Zuckerberg both agree could be the next major platform shift, which is, you know, us using smart glasses and AR glasses to augment, you know, how we use our phones and to eventually shift usage away from phones to wearables. That has been the narrative that has been spun by both of them, like I said for eight years now. It still feels far away. I think it's getting closer, but it's still not on the near horizon. And the question is whether Snap has the

leash to survive that long while Meta's investing so much. It does seem very clear that Snap thought this would all be ready much sooner than it turns out it's actually going to be ready. And that's not just that. That's everybody. Right. Like that is the whole industry. It's like, I think back to when all the like lifts and ubers and everybody were telling us that by 2020, everybody was taking robotaxies, right? Like it's it's just the timeline of all of this just, everybody turned out to be wrong. You know, it's, it's funny you said robotaxies, though, because I was thinking about that. I was in Phoenix last weekend, and I was seeing all the Waymo's on the street there, and they're starting to pop up here where I live in L.A. I see them in SF every time I go up there.

And, you know, thinking about, yeah, how long we had to deal with companies saying that self-driving was right around the corner. And all of a sudden, it's kind of here, right? Waymo's doing hundreds of thousands of rides. I think AR may be a similar story. I think it's, yes. They've been saying it for a long time and it's easy to feel like, oh, like, you know, it's just another year of prototypes and vaporware and it's no closer. But I do feel like it's getting closer. I think it may be a thing where we really don't see it at meaningful scale, meaning millions of units a year until towards the end of this decade, like 2028-ish is I think when meta especially expects it to hit. But I'm expecting these to be good demos, spectacles and meta's classes. and it wasn't here for a really long time until all of a sudden it was.

That's actually a good segue to meta, because I think if there is going to be a company in the immediate future that is able to just sort of one day drop it on us, it seems like it's going to be meta. Everything we're hearing out of Apple is that Apple's ability to make something that is very good and affordable is a long way out. Snap, I think we're both sort of slowly giving up on. It feels like if there is a company that is going to figure this out

in a like all of a sudden it's mainstream kind of way, it's probably going to be meta. And my God, would I not have been on that five years ago? But it feels like it feels like here we are. And especially the rayban glasses have been so successful. And it feels like that has shifted metas thinking about how to sequence some of this stuff in some ways. Like what's your sense of what we're going to see it connect in a couple of weeks. Yeah.

You're right that Rayban has shifted their view a little bit here because these last Rayban smart glasses, which I have, I don't know if you've used them, the version two. Yeah. I have a pair. They're awesome. I use them all the time. They're quite good. And it's the first meta-hardware product I see normal people using and talking about. And they've been very pleasantly surprised with how well it's done. And what they're going to show it Connect is separate from the Rayban line.

I'm expecting updated Rayban stuff, but nothing meaningful. But really what the big AR glasses thing is this project they've been working on since 2018 called Orion. And they have put billions of dollars into this product. I actually don't think it's a stretch to say they have maybe invested SNAP's entire market cap as a public company into this one pair of glasses. Like trying to invent new metals, new battery technology, to try to make a pair of semi-lightweight. They're not going to be lightweight. They're about 4x the weight of regular glasses, but still, that's a meaningful upgrade from like the early Magic League demos. Well, and like the Vision Pro or the Quest.

Like it's much closer to glasses than those things. Very chunky Clark Kent looking glasses that do a whole. holograms, let you virtually, you know, conference with people, integrate with Meta's other apps. So having some 2D elements from other apps brought into there. And it's a prototype. It's not something they're going to be selling. They're making even fewer of them than Snap Spectacles. They cost a lot of money. I mean, both the new spectacles and the Orion Glasses cost thousands of dollars to make per unit. So this is very like out there tech that, you know, leaders at Met have told me it's prohibitively expensive to do this as a mainstream product.

Meta hoped, Zuckerberg hoped that Orion was going to be their first consumer air glasses product. They made the call about two years ago to make it a glorified prototype that they just showed to the world. And I think they're doing that because even though they don't have the same business pressure as SNAP, they need to justify what they're doing here because this AR program has cost a lot of money. And I think everyone looks at Quest and goes, oh, like it's all VR. They have a lot of people working on these glasses. and they're separate from Rayban, but I think you will see the Rayban stuff that they're doing and Orion converge in the coming years,

and they'll approach it from different angles, but they'll have the kind of lower tech, cheaper smart glasses without high-end displays, and then the high-end display classes, and then those they hope will emerge towards the end of this decade. But this is a big, like, moment in terms of just saying, like, we have something that works,

even though in a highly controlled demo, and we're not selling it, but here it is, and here's like a marker of where we are in the progression of this technology. And I'm expecting Orion to be the most advanced, you know, a pair of error glasses that I will have tried. That doesn't mean it's a good product, right? But it probably will mean it's a good demo. And I think that's all meta hopes for. Yeah. The context of this moment is really interesting to me, because I feel like if you rewind, what, a little over a year now, meta like front ran the Vision Pro trying to basically get its thing out there before Apple did

because there was this perception that Apple was going to come out and just instantly upend the market and change everything and be the only name anybody cared about in this space. That obviously did not happen. Like I think you and I were on this show about a year ago talking about how that might happen and meta was afraid and everybody was nervous about what Apple would do when it entered this market.

I think if anything Apple has actually made it harder on everybody else because the Vision Pro has not, it hasn't done anything. Like, I don't know that I'd call it a failure. It's just like a nothing. Like, no one talks about the Vision Pro. It's just not there. It doesn't exist in the world.

So, and now, Meta has this hit in the Rayban glasses. Mark Zuckerberg has been on, like, the PR 180 of a lifetime. So it feels like the context for this company coming into this moment, like, could not be more different than I think meta would have expected a year ago. And so to some extent, I want to some extent, I want to say, I want to say, I don't. wonder if this is going to feel like meta just sort of flexing on them much more so than being like, look, we're still in the game. We're trying to be cool. It's just going to be like Mark with a bunch of gold chains on just being like, this cool thing I build. I guarantee you there will be some

chains, but I don't know, man. I see that, but I also just look at what they're announcing and it's not a product, right? So we are still on the like demo phase of AR glasses and I feel like we've been stuck in that since the first magic leap. And it doesn't feel like this. You know, year will move us out of that phase. It feels like we're still stuck there. And it's hard to like, you know, I'm expecting to try Orion and the new spectacles. And it's hard to feel about how do I write about these? Because it's kind of vaporware in a sense, right? It's not something that someone can buy and take home with them. So what is the point? And, you know, I think each, you know, company, Snap and Netta has slightly different reasons for doing it. But I think they both just want to say,

look, we're still in this fight. We're still in this race. And we think, we think there is a, you know, pot at the end of the rainbow here. And it keeps getting pushed further and further out. But here's what we've got. And, you know, I should note, like, Orion, I think will be also different because meta has invested a lot in this wristband. They're going to have that pairs with it that essentially allows you to control it with your thoughts. It's EMG technology. It's not mind reading, but they bought a startup called Control Labs that we've covered a lot here on the Verge years ago to do this. And they've been working on some really novel input technology for wearables that I'm really interested in, even beyond the actual displays. So that's something

to watch as well. And then the AI piece, I think meta has meaningfully accelerated on in the last year. I don't know. Have you used the visual AI in the Raybans yet? In bits and pieces. Yeah. It's really cool. It feels it feels kind of sticky most of the time when I use it, but it is good. It works like half the time for me, right? It still hallucinates. It still makes things up, but it's fast. And it's made me realize like, oh, like a visual Chad GPT like AI in my glasses that understands the world around me is just a killer feature. And when it works at scale, will make me use my phone less. And I don't even need displays for that. And I think Met has seen that in the last six months, even with how kind of rudimentary it is now and said, wow, like we need to lean into this. And they have, I think,

just better tech in this regard than Snap. And I think for wearable glasses to take off, really, we've seen now in the last year that you need that AI piece. And I think that's something metal will also keep leaning into very heavily at Connect and after that. It makes sense. So I understand, I think, most of the motivation for why Snap needs to talk about this stuff and kind of remind people that it's in the game and still matters and get people to build for its platform. And like, I get that from SnapSide. For meta, I don't know that I get it quite as much because meta is is doing very well in AI, which are, if you're an investor, is the only thing anybody cares about. If anything, everybody views all this other stuff as a diversion. So to keep doing this stuff basically out

of the public view of Wall Street, seems like it sort of makes sense. Also, like, things are going well at meta. So coming out and being like, look, we have this cool thing that we can't ship, isn't it so cool? It just doesn't seem like it gains the company all that much. But I guess to your point, if they've been doing this now for six years, like literally, maybe it's just for team morale, you eventually have to show the people what you're working on. Like, maybe it really is just that simple. I think that's a huge piece of it. And, you know, people don't like working on hardware that never ships. And I think that was actually a big motivation with Division Pro finally launching. I think just after so many years, you've got to have something to show. And yeah, I think meta being on its front foot,

versus its back foot this year means that, you know, they feel better about doing this. But I think, you know, to your earlier point about like, what's the motivation, Snap and Meta's, you know, big picture motivation is actually very similar, which is that they both grew their businesses under the thumb of Apple and Google and mobile phone app store control. And if there is going to be a coming hardware shift where people use wearables at least as much as phones, if not more, they want to have a seat at the table and they want to control their own destiny. And Zuckerberg especially has been very clear about this in interviews with me and others that this is a huge motivating factor. I mean, he's been kind of

Apple public enemy number one for a while now. And, you know, I don't think that if Apple, you know, finally releases air glasses in the coming years, like, I don't think it's a given to assume that they would let meta's apps on there. And I don't think meta thinks it's given that they would do that. And so if you are maybe going to get boxed out and future hardware shifts, you know, you better play to win and you better have your own hardware. And that's the motivation. But the question is, is that the right bet? And is this actually going to be hardware that normal people want to use in the coming years? And I think the jury's definitely out on that.

Yeah. That tracks. But I do think, I mean, to your point, if this is the sort of thing that is going to happen, what's the phrase slowly and then all at once? Yeah. Being early is much safer than being late, right? Unless you're snapping, you literally can't afford to have spent all this money. Like, meta can afford to be early, like literally with dollars afford to be early in a way that I think it seems to be willing to do that. Yeah. I mean, look at Waymo and Google and self-driving. You know, they've plowed billions of dollars into Waymo. There's been many years in the last decade where investors and the public are like, what are you doing? Just give up on this. It's never going to work. All of a sudden, it's starting to work. People are getting. being picked up by Waymo's from the airport, you know, they're out in the world working. And now, you know, if it hits, if it really hits and it hits scale and is like the next Uber, but cheaper to run and this is this huge business benefit to Google, everyone will forgive the last 10 years of, you know, sinking money into this for no result. And I think AR is a similar story with perhaps

an even greater return because, you know, VR is something that's isolating and you wear mostly inside and by yourself, but the idea is that AR glasses are something you wear all day long and take with you and the time spent in them is huge because you wear, like, if you're me, you wear glasses almost all day. And I think they see that as like a huge potential way to create a new business. And yeah, I just think that I like that you brought up self-driving because I think there's a lot of analogies there. Yeah. No, it makes sense. And I do feel like the AR thing is so funny because it's like, it's like the AI story in that the biggest version of the story you can tell is so damn big that you like seem ridiculous if you don't try to chase it in some way, even though the odds of it getting as big as you want. Like it seems to me to be just as likely that everybody says, no, I don't want a screen on my face.

Thank you. As they do to say, yes, AR glasses forever. But the possibility, if it hits, it's going to hit so big that all of these companies are desperately afraid of not chasing that thing. Right. And meta has the money to be able to make this kind of bet, and Snap increasingly does not. And so the question is, who is standing at the end of the next few years here and who has the ability to keep investing? And I would put my money on meta right now. Yeah, I tend to agree. All right. One more question, and then I will let you go. You mentioned these things are super expensive to make, and that's one of the reasons these companies are not selling them. There was also report from the information a few days ago that meta scrapped what I think was supposed to be. It's really high-end. because they just never figured out a way to do it at the price that they wanted to. And Mark Zuckerberg has been saying to you and others for forever that price is really important in all of this stuff and that one of the things meta has been doing, like he sort of intimated

kind of in as many words, we could have made a thing as good as the Vision Pro, but we chose not to because it would have been too expensive. And I'm curious now, having seen what we saw from the Vision Pro, both in terms of like how good the thing is, but also what it has done in the world. what do you make of meta's kind of ongoing obsession with price? Like is this the right move even in the early days of these things to only want to sell things cheap? You know, I thought it was, but I don't know. I think these things need to be better products before we start really caring about price.

Well, that's the Apple bet, right? Like we're going to make the best thing possible, whatever it costs, and then we'll figure out how to make it cheaper. Yeah. And I think meta has maybe focused and is continuing to focus a little too much on price. But it's not to say that the Quest is not a good product per se. but it's not something that I want to use. I was put it that way. And I think they have to figure out

why people want to strap these things onto their face and that still has not really been figured out. And price feels kind of secondary because it's like, oh, I have this cheaper thing that you don't know how to use, while you still don't know how to use it. So why would you buy it? It's an eighth of the price

and still sort of pointless for you. Do you want it now? Right. But I think long term, it is a iOS for, is Android thing all over again. Meta is going to be the cheaper, you know, your margin is my opportunity player here, whereas Apple will be Apple and have Apple margins and charge a lot of money because they can. And they have a built-in, you know, loyalty base to people who will pay anything for a new Apple product. And I don't see that changing. I see meta-canceling, you know, it's high-end

kind of vision pro competitor is more of a realization that this high-end market for these headsets. and I'm drawing a distinction between these headsets and air glasses, but headsets at a high end, even with great displays, the market's just not there yet, and the software ecosystem's not there. We've seen that with the Vision Pro in the last year. And for meta, I think it makes more sense for them to play at the lower end and let Apple have the higher end.

Yeah, I mean, that to me is the lesson of the Raybans, right? That it's like, actually, if you take something that does substantially less, but make it sort of socially workable, and make it good, you have something. Like, that, to me, feels like a much saner starting point for, what are they? They're, like, $350, I think. And you can buy them with insurance and, yeah. Yeah, and then it was like, take that and start to just add stuff on top of it.

Do more stuff at the cameras. Do more stuff with, like, the biometrics you can get. Like, that feels like a path to something very cool much more directly than, like, we made this thing. It costs $5 grand. How do we make it cost $500? Yeah. I just don't, that's like, several physics mirror.

away, right? And I think, to me, that's going to be the thing I'm curious to see is like, this Orion project is six years old. And I wonder, like, now with all of this hindsight, both on how that has gone and what the Raybans thing has done, what the roadmap internally starts to look like at meta is just going to be fascinating. Well, I can tell you a little bit before we go, which is just smart glasses with little displays like Google Glass Viewfinder coming out next year from meta. And then the full-fledged consumer air glasses, not until at least 2027, maybe 28. And they're hoping to be shipping millions of those by like 2029, 2030.

But the Rayban thing is a huge long-term strategic thing for them. And to the point where they may be investing billions of dollars in the parent company of Rayban. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. God, the meta being like a part owner of the glasses company that runs the universe. Yeah, Elserra Luxottica, which also just bought Supreme. So we may see Supreme branded meta glasses. I'm not kidding.

This is how Mark got his glow up. He's just going to buy himself into the fashion industry. Yeah. And realizing that glasses are fashion and you have to lean into that if you want people to wear smart glasses. And I think it's interesting and a twist of fate because Snap almost did the same thing, almost did a partnership with Lexotica for smart glasses many, many years ago and didn't. And now Meta has struck gold with it. And it's been just fun for me to report on how Snap and Mavis.

Meta keep like crisscrossing each other here and they're both trying to get to the same destination in very different ways. All right. Well, all of this is happening in September. So I suspect we are going to have many chances to check back in. But thank you, as always for doing this. Much appreciated. Thanks.

All right. We've got to take a break. Then we'll come back to be the first guest hotline. We're right back. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, finance edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are not.

navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged, and I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you're rich BFF. All right. We're back. Let's get to the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com.

You can hit me up on threads. I don't know. We're not that hard to reach here at the Vergecast, but we want to hear all of your questions about everything. We're going to do a lot of, I think, buying stuff between now and the end of the year because it's like shopping season, it's upgrade season, everybody's getting new software. So if you're trying to figure out, should I buy this or that,

how do I think about which one I should buy? Is 8 gigs of RAM and my laptop really enough? Hit us up. We want to hear all of your questions. This week, we have a question about AI. Hi, this is Dan from San Francisco. I've been thinking about the idea of the first mover advantage when it comes to AI and wondering if it's true.

Are there recent examples of it actually proving worthwhile as a theory? And does it really matter for AI that some people are ahead right now or will a company who you've never heard of probably be the winner in the long run? Thanks. So this question comes at a really funny time because I just had a lot of long conversation with someone in the tech industry about more or less this question. The question of whether or not the AI industry is going to calcify, right? On the one hand, you have the fact that these things are vastly more expensive all the time

to train. These models are super complicated, super humongous. You need a lot of Nvidia chips that are hard to get. It is very, very hard to go from nothing to competitive in the AI world. On the other hand, it feels like it's moving faster than ever. AI is going from meaning one thing to meaning lots of things. There are lots of companies with lots of resources that have not started playing this game in this kind of way. So it both feels like there are big players and like nothing has yet been decided.

But to the question of first mover advantage, I have two thoughts on this. One is that I think pretty clearly there was some first mover advantage. when ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022, that changed the industry, right? Like, you really cannot overstate the extent to which there is a tech industry before the launch of ChatGPT, and there is a tech industry after the launch of ChatGPT. Right or wrong, correct or incorrect, the thing that happened when ChatGPT came out and 100 million people used it and went, oh my God, this is the future, changed everything, right? And all of these companies had to scramble to keep up.

Google basically completely changed its company around AI. Microsoft started spinning up lots of new things. It had some advantage just by virtue of its existing relationship with OpenAI. All these other companies that had been working on AI stuff kind of in the background as a research project over the years. Like AI is not a new thing, but AI as a consumer product is new. And ChatGPT, which I feel like I've said this a million times, but Open AI did not understand the extent to which this is going to be a hit consumer product. So it was not ready for this either. But we've gotten to the point now where OpenAI is the biggest name in AI and it's not close.

I think you can have interesting arguments about whose tech is the best and whose best positioned and whatever. But OpenAI is a household name. And that is because of Chat GPT. Chat GPT is a household name. GPT as a thing is a household name. People use that term like they do ATM. It's nuts. I hate that we've allowed this to happen.

But here we are. We just use GPT in conversation. So I think to one extent, Open AI bought itself a lot of time and a lot of reputation and a lot of runway by being first. It was also better than pretty much everything else that came out right after, both because it went first and because it was just better. Open AI had very good tech. They've been working on this for a long time. ChatGPT was well ahead of everybody else. I don't think that's that true anymore.

It feels like for really the last, I don't know, year, but especially over the last six months, every couple of of weeks, some company has released a new model that they claim is, you know, a step better than all of the other models, right? You have OpenAI doing it with all the GPTs, Anthropic is doing it with the various versions of Claude. Google is doing it with Gemini. Meta is doing it with Lama. There's this incredible arms race as these models get bigger. They get faster. They get more efficient. They get cheaper for developers to use. They get cheaper for the companies to run. So we have this incredible sort of leapfrogging game happening between all of these companies. On the one hand, that kind of negates the first mover advantage, right? You can argue Anthropic was late to this game, but I think it's caught up in a really big way. I hear a lot of people talking about Claude, which is Anthropics model, kind of its version of ChatGPT, being better and more fun to use and more useful than ChatGPT. And Gemini, I think, because of the way that it's integrated with other Google services, has some huge advantages.

What Microsoft is doing with Copilot, which is kind of associated. with, but not the same as Open AI stuff is also the same, right? So you have these companies that have other huge advantages, which is basically they can attach AI to their products that is going to make it easy for them to catch up. The flip side is that as these models get bigger and as they get more complicated and as they get more impressive, the cost to build one just goes through the roof. Like these things are so unbelievably expensive to train. Forget about running them and the cost every time somebody queries it and you have to actually process their information through this trained model, the cost of training these models is so, so, so high and not going to go down, right?

The only way these things get better is if they get bigger and they do more. And for these kind of catch-all models, it's just going to be a few companies that can do it. I don't think that's that different from what we've seen before. I mean, think about like cloud resources, right? You have AWS, you have Microsoft Azure, and you have Google Cloud. other companies can be in that game, but you have to have unbelievable amounts of resources to have the amount of computing power, just the number of data centers, the number of employees, what it takes to really operate a global cloud network just isn't available to most companies. And the same is going to be true with these like behemoth AI models. But if you believe, and I do believe that AI is not ultimately going to just be about these behemoth, like do everything models, there's going to be lots of room for other people.

to get in. Right. So one metaphor says AI is like cloud services and there are going to be a bunch of huge companies and then a bunch of little companies that do specific things, right? If you need ultra secure cloud services, you might not use one of those big ones. You might use a small firm, but those are kind of niche things. There's another version of it that is like the internet, right? And you have a bunch of big companies that do big things. Facebook is kind of all things to all people in the same way that maybe chat GPT is. But there's also tons of smaller and different and more specific things. And if you think about AI in those terms, we're just at the very beginning of a huge culture shift that doesn't actually depend all that much on the models that companies like

Open AI are generating. As this stuff gets more open source, there's going to be more access for this stuff. I think we're starting to see some of these models get commoditized to the point where having the biggest, newest model is only going to be useful for some things and that most people will be perfectly happy with the local models that are able to run faster and locally on your computer, or the simple models that can run on lower end hardware that run on TVs and things like that. So what you're looking at, instead of a race to the top for these most impressive models, you're looking at just this kind of incredible splintering around the whole industry. And if that's what's going to happen, there won't be a first mover advantage in the same way

that there wasn't a first mover advantage like being the first website on the internet. It's cool. It comes with some upsides. It might give you a lead, but the thing that there is out there is way too big for anyone company to win anyway. I think it could go either way. And I think right now if you're Open AI, you have so much cachet and so much upside. And the fact that Sam Altman is like the face of AI as a thing is really useful to Open AI. And we'll keep propelling Open AI at the top of this industry and getting media coverage and getting developer interests and all this stuff for a long time. but if AI is not just for companies giving you models that you can do everything on, but is actually as big as everybody says, it's too big for any one company to be in charge of. I know that's not really an answer. It's a little bit of both. There is a first mover advantage,

but I think it's going to get away from everybody, and I also think it's too complicated for that. I hope that helps. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. Thank you to everybody, by the way, who has called and messaged and emailed with your productivity systems after hearing the episode

on Sunday. That has been super fun to see. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or an AI model to sell me, you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge11. We love hearing from you. And like I said, buying advice. If you have buying thoughts, hit us up. We want to hear it all. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Wilpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday with Alex and Eli to talk about who even knows, some gadgets, some AI news, telegram. It's just a crazy week. We'll get it all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.